Voices

Cast Out
to Talk Us In
VOICES CAST OUT TO TALK US IN
WINNER OF THE IOWA POETRY PRIZE

Voices Cast Out

 Poems by Ed Roberson
FOREWORD BY ANDREW WELSH

to Talk Us In

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS '+' Iowa City

University ofIowa Press,
Iowa City 52242
Copyright © 1995 by Ed Roberson
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
of America
Design by Richard Hendel
No pan of this book may be
reproduced or used in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying and recording,
without permission in writing from the
publisher.
The publication of this book was
supported by the generous assistance
of the University of Iowa Foundation.
Printed on acid-free paper

Libraty of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roberson, Ed.
Voices cast out to talk us in: poems / by
Ed Roberson; foreword by Andrew Welsh.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87745-510-4
I. Tide.
PS3568.0235V65 1995
8U ' ·54 - dc20 95-1031
CIP

ISBN-I3978-0-87745-51O-3
For Lena. The dedication is in the form and her friendships.

And for Bob Supansic, John Seidman, and the Harmattan Group,

to whom lowe much,

Peggy Bierer

Kathy Boykowycz

Catherine McCann

Ken Roberson

Cynthia Yanda

Frank Walters

Andy Welsh
CONTENTS

Foreword by Andrew Welsh, xi

Lucid Interval as Integral Music

The Form
Picking Up the Tune, the Universe and Planets, 5

This Week's Concerts

I. because the final, II
II. songs without words, 12

III. the rice care, 13

IV. The park geese, 14

v. A sudden smoothness like a glass, 15

VI. there are no stars in, 16
VII. With the dead rest, 17
VIII. the cobra standing, 18
IX. we can run out of our side, 19
x. blood: someone says it's not, 20

XI. The fast storm sky wiped so suddenly, 21

XII. the walls become whole, 22

XIII. the builders baled chambers, 23

XIV. I pull a curtain of the great cats, 24

xv. The Local/Elevations, 25

XVI. No, 26
XVII. a carnival of bald deer, 27
XVIII. the rule of the spirits guesses, 28
XIX. the fireworks mariner, 29
xx. you have to run forward, 30
XXI. Their body holding, 31
XXII. I walk nights, 32
XXIII. sometime I'm going to have to, 33
XXIV. As a boy there were no black boy, 34
xxv. and now here I was in the amazon, 35
XXVI. it is a flash flood, 36
 XXVII. Huge Spaces Apart We Still Look Each Other Face to Face
(SantaBarbara), 37
XXVIII. when I saw it I thought I was hundreds, 38

XXIX. the variations on god, 39

At Any of the Bethabaras: Metempsychosis, 40

xxx. Red Shift, 41
XXXI. influence it, 42

XXXII. We had seen a first, 43

XXXIII. Information, 44

XXXIV. one of the things we were, 45

xxxv. something stretched out on balance, 46

Seizure by Simple Error, 47
XXXVI. It is without example, 48

XXXVII. The notebooks are where the foot, 49

XXXVIII. in this song the people are singing, 50

XXXIX. a T-square regular, 51

XL. I Have Opened Six ofTi's Nine Knots, 52

XLI. the puzzle in bundles, 53

XLII. there is a cleft brain talking diamond, 54

XLIII. Simbi Petro Damballah La Flambeau, 55
XLIV. The Seven Deltas of Shango's Wives, 56

XLV. where day sun's long pile, 57

Interval and Final Day's Concerts

Interval, 61
I. 12.b.obs.OED, 62

II. Isolating the Nurturent Reflex to Sound, 63

III. knowing the music, 64

IV. labyrinth is a real route, 65

v. Photograph: The House of the Poet, 66
VI . . . . Apart from What Each Other Is ... , 67
VII. the fairy tales were over and had grown, 68

VIII. They say when, 69

IX. Ours is a foolish fire, 70
Whose sleeves, 71
x. That everything can go, 72

VIII
The Aerialist Narratives

Chapter One
I. Aerialist Narrative, 77
II. Taking the Print, 78
III. Heading: The Landing, 79
IV. Waterfowl Landing: It Lifts to Close, 81

v. Properties, 82
VI. Cape Journal: At Sand Pile, 84
VII. African Ascendancy, 88
VIII. Research at the Interstice, 89
IX. The Motorcycle Crossing, 90

x. The Comb, 93
XI. Given Way, 94

Chapter Two
I. mblemati.txt, 99
II. stepping through I, 100
III. Heron Riddle Flashback, 102

IV. The skipping stone stays out of the water, 107

v. Cinquain de Lune, 109

VI. What the Return of the Lines Meant, 110

VII. Chorus at Ohiopyle, III

VIII. Gnosis, 115

IX. The birds put inside, 116

x. Elegy for a White Cock, 118

XI. Onze, 123

Chapter Three
I. A widow suckling, 127

II. bomb, 128

III. On the Line, 130

IV. There were these, 133

v. And 0,136
VI. Handed the Rain, 138

VII. the flock of black cormorants flying, 140

IX
 VIII. Ask for "How High the Moon," 141
IX. After the De-Tonations on the Moon by NASA, 145
x. Ha, 146
XI. In Light of Dream, 149

x
FOREWORD Andrew Welsh

A WAY IN

A dozen years ago or more, Ed Roberson presented me with a ceramic pot he

had made. As pots go, it is solid and fairly squat, firm rather than fragile; with
its ornate lid it stands about ten inches high. The outside surface is scored, and
pot and lid are glazed the same: dark brown and light brown of mud and rock
jostle each other with no design - rough, volcanic. But lift up the lid and look
inside: a smooth, clear interior appears, a transparent blue hovering between
turquoise and aquamarine, as deep and quietly beautiful as the sky of a calm
spring day. Why, I wondered, did he put the earth outside and the sky inside?
But several years later my one-year-old daughter, making her daily circuits on
her father's arm around our home to visit the stations of things to look at and
touch, knew that the pot was the right place, the only place, for keeping a spe-
cial toy, her colorful and magical Jacob's ladder. Each day she would reach in
and ceremoniously lift the toy from its blue-green home, watch the panels of
Chinese paper unfold down one side and the other, then gaze into the empty
pot before returning the ladder to its watery sky. Since then more years have
passed. And now in this book I finally hear - in a poem both riddle and myth, in
a voice already on its way to becoming another voice - the words for her word-
less wonder,

given to
look into the bowl
of sky

for it to fill
with future ...

This book is given-first to the poet's daughter, then to the rest of us-to
look into, to wonder at, and to watch it fill with meaning. "Time does not
finish a poem," wrote Jack Spicer. Ed Roberson's poems require time, and they
will flourish through many rereadings. In contemporary American poetry there
is enough, perhaps more than enough, of the single-voiced poem, the obses-
sive, confessional voice, say, or the windy, romantic voice. The voice - or rather,

XI
the lattice of voices - in Ed Roberson's poems is something very different,
closer in some ways to the intricate language and complex beauty of medieval
coun poetry. It is highly technical poetry, in the sense that it uses technique to
say what it has to say: the poetry is in the saying and is not something that has
already been said, then put into verse.
The technique embraces all the dimensions of poetic language - diction,
image, music. But especially fundamental to these poems is the idea of differ-
ent voices using the same words to say different things. In the opening poems
of "This Week's Concerts," the phrase "the perpetual jar of things" - plucked
from some book of Eastern mysticism ("I don't know where / from") - unfolds
like a Jacob's ladder into "the jarring of things," and "a jar of things," and
"things ajar." Each is a motif for a different song. Another poem from the same
section of the book watches a hawk (and other things) suspended in the air-

with so
little flight no one notices it
is predatory

-one voice lazily saying "no one notices it," another saying more ominously
"no one notices it is predatory," while a third voice sounds the alarm: "It is
predatory!" In "The Aerialist Narratives" there is another poem about flight:
the flight of birds, made possible by the "nothingness" at the core of their
bones, and the flight of nineteenth-century slaves nonhward across the Ohio
River, made possible by the "nothingness" they must put at the core of their
heans. The "aerialist" narrator (who also is simply an aerial, picking up sta-
tions from all directions) hears the voice of an old song:

wash away your tears tears wash away

your tears are the rivers and even they will

wash away

Embedded in the refrain of consolation ("wash away your tears") is a simple

voice of hope ("tears [do] wash away"), then a more triumphant voice of hope
("your tears are the rivers and even they will wash away"), but also in the back-
ground a stern voice of eschatological pI:ophecy ("the rivers ... even they will
wash away"). The poems of "Interval and Final Day's Concerts" layout the ba-

XII
sis of this counterpointing - in the figure, for example, of a phonograph needle
on a record scratching out an ars poetica:

Point in these words

takes up the turning
subject
after the silence after
what was meant last.
At renewal.

And again in the following poem:

Where alternative interrupts alternative

no idea lives long enough to see

through and is barely music.

The invocation of music throughout the book is not gratuitous; the sounds of
speech, the movements of syntax, and the rhythms of meaning become in
these poems a complex musical art.
Music and image folded beautifully together in ways more familiar to lyric
poetry are present as well, in abundance, in the sight, for example, of geese
landing on a lake, who "come in motionless as seed / and make the surface
bloom," or in a riddle-poem that sees a great blue heron as "a tablespoon /
from wch the wings spill flying / slowly." And even a wrenching poem on the
murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the last poem of the book, is beautiful as it
tells us of a recurring dream of sunlight and shadows on the balconies of Amer-
ica, a dream of trying to avert the murder by turning back a sundial as large as
the nation, a dream known all the time to be hopeless and yet necessary to hold
on to- "something ... / or die away into the night lying."
The accomplishment of form appears in larger structures of the book as
well: the elaborate reflecting of poems and voices by counterpoems running
beneath them in the first half of the book, for example, and the architectural
perspectives and transformations of the seen world created by the "up in the
air" point of view of the second half. This is poetry that invites and hand-
somely entertains good criticism. It may be some. time before its tapestry is

XIII
completely unfolded, but that is happy work to anticipate. It probably will not
come from the professionals of criticism, in university departments of litera-
ture; their attention is directed elsewhere. The amateurs, the lovers of poetry-
who love language that is compressed and focused, at the very pitch of dia-
mond precision even as it is unfolding like a large, showy rose-they are the
ones who will map out for themselves the discoveries in these poems, just as
those did who, for love, first followed the language of Whitman and Dickin-
son, of Stevens and Williams, into a new country.

"FAR HERE COME"

That country includes Pittsburgh, where Ed Roberson was born, raised, and
educated, and also New Jersey, where he now lives. Because he has climbed
mountains in the Andes and once was nearly killed by a flash flood in the
mountain jungles of Ecuador, we glimpse in several poems orchids and foam-
ing water fused in a landscape of fear. Because he has crossed the nation on a
motorcycle, we see the dotted highway line rotate in the desert night and run
up the sky as stars. Because he has worked in a public aquarium, caring for lu-
minescent tropical fish and swimming with dolphins, the submarine realm of
these poems is richly populated (notice the cormorants flying underwater). Be-
cause he has been a potter, the figure of a jar in the opening poems performs a
complicated art of centering, and because he has been a night watchman in a
warehouse, we see in the penultimate poem of the book three straight poplars
and a burning bush appear in the warehouse aisles. (Interestingly, although he
has been, and still is, a university professor and administrator, none of that ex-
perience seems to touch his poetry.) And because Ed Roberson is a father, the
experience of caring for an infant daughter frames the poems of the first half of
the book, the daughter giving her name to the dominant verse-form of those
poems: "the lena," a form of interruption and shifted direction.
A new country, then, but not a foreign country. The bittersweet experience
of an African American poet's life touches its every feature - the bitterness deep
but not despairing, the sweetness savored. And yet, intertwined with the elab-
orate beauty of these poems, closely and cunningly worked into them, are
voices of pain, pain grown too familiar, the voices speaking in modes that range
from formal elegy and lament to gospel and blues. Most poets sooner or later

XIV
tell of personal pain, when life comes to be chronicled more by losses small and
large than by its gifts, and this poet does too. But we also hear of our national
pain in these poems, the long, deep fracture lines of pain that run through the
geology of American society, for which the Mrican American writer is our
keenest seismologist.
We hear of-we are not to forget - abducted Mricans drowned on the mid-
dle passage, of slaves following the night sky's "drinking gourd" across the river
to freedom, of lynching's strange fruit and of blood in the streets, of the kill-
ings of King in Memphis, prisoners at Attica, four little girls - four daughters
singing jump-rope rhymes - blown apart in their church in Birmingham. We
hear-we are allowed to hear-a stunned and bitter young voice just learning
how things really are in his homeland:

What your own

people never wanted you to have to know

and feel sorry for you if you don't

of the sense of betrayal taking up permanent residence:

it tells us who we are we are betrayed

of one's inner life becoming "double minded" and of dissimulation becoming

an unwanted routine in the manners of external life:

my blood

has had to lie in

absorbing the lives
we were losing.

And we hear of endurance, of strong hearts giving strength to others, of John

Henry and of Moses - we hear a victory song:

having stood on each other

didn't we open the rock like our hearts
didn't it bleed too to yield too to eat.

And further, almost unbelievably, with all "the bitterness of this fruit / clothing
a nation," the aerialist narrator at times seems to see from one or another of his

xv
odd perspectives that all this is "illusion of separation," in which people, even
good people, get caught. In "Ask for 'How High the Moon,''' an amazing tour
de force near the end of the book - a poem that in midcourse begins to run
backward - the whole moon half lighted and half darkened, an eerily beautiful
jellyfish, sea and sky, snow and rock, the cycling seasons, Ella Fitzgerald, and a
preacher in ecstasy all want to sing and to dance- with you, "the light and the
shadow holding together." Our aerialist sees, I think, not only the past; he sees
the bowl of the future, too. Filling. Oh, look. ...

XVI
Lucid Interval as Integral Music
THE FORM
Picking Up the Tune, the Universe and Planets

this form is the lena

after my daughter
here she is I will have to
hold on a minute tell you her line.

a scribble
the universe and planets holes and scribbles
pure
interruption she gets her changing

she is the only music she gives

the intervals
in which it is written.
she is

back she only wanted me to pick her up to say so.

I. still autonomic
still as

5
I. still autonomic
still as unspeeched as conception's
about what now-breathed message
reflection prior to its face
should carry you
at seeing,

about what you claim as

- If I am the lake you take your face from-
a reflection
at the sight of me,
I crawled

as far back in as I could to you

into the water's trouble,

into yet temp let noise

between each word,
inchoate sea that spirals as shell does out
- helpless as any later meanings-
as the world.
The father has

always been brought to his knees

by this.

6
fear that
the terror the peter pulled out short of

bearing, always tricked, had this

time also got through,

that twin, the disorder, stowaway again,

had, with won life, reset all's possible end,

and that fathers, held to more than

their power songs now cover,

have to re-face
meaninglessness,

clutching infants who

haven't yet words,

screaming for them

their protective songs
incoherently.

7
THIS WEEK'S CONCERTS
I.

because the final

confessions of a coarse air
bail the fire out
we are innocent of adduction.

taking the body down

we thought was a solo for fuel.
shoving it in for warmth
we cracked

our perpetual jar of things

to a more
naked jarring blast.
the crimes wch you wear my body for

I myself committed.

II
II.

songs without words

scenes of infants.
or 0 sing unto the lord
good morning as birds.

tribute to the saintly

the bait the killers.
endangered animals
will they survive? this is all.

the perpetual jar of things

i don't know where
from it's caused or filled
or quoted without these words

I am shaken.

2. I might have screamed

the wrong spell, the wrong words,
the wrong defiance thrown the property
against the specie for,
for love
written a senseless draft and wasted
myself at war, like my age,
remembering the more complete
for bottoming out of means
human
to even sit down and eat beside another
to ride on a bus or go to school
to recall any chance at all of an even
hand free of the holding
class

12
III.

the nee care

is left in the frog harp.
several early songs
hurt the farmers' heart

after nightfall.
to mention the soldiers
is to state it to death.
a souvenir silence.

string in a labyrinth.
no glvmg away
is the look out
commanding the entire face

floating without bottom in that earth

remembering the more complete

the more the perpetual
jar of things
lends no aright, nor tapped,
no center on the wheel. all form, all voice
is day. in different. we
are right only
to what we give birth to, anyhow,
we are correct only within
what we create,
only
the examinations we make
up out of each
last hour's erasures mark us right.

13
Iv.

The park geese

are dozing at their dance
on water.
Their necks

in the straps of their closed wings

They are swung like subway riders.
depicting the floating
carcass

is a high form of held

Instant in dance
As fleet as death is in life.
the river stone is here

A black step in a tree reflection skipped still.

4. because of the suggestion all the versions

of peoples in trees make
to americans,
the africans, the pater monkey, the
jesuses crucified, the lynchings
the yearbook blondes swung in
all the alumni arbors,

the surface of the water reflects what is

Under the umbrella of such leaves
Even stone leaps to the surface
The stones on the bottom are mistaken for the bottom
ofa hanging
black man's feet on the surface
reflection. Dancing nationally in the trees or.
A skipping stone. also skipped still strange fruit

14
v.
A sudden smoothness like a glass
between the swells enchanted valley
wandering the wild sea drifts.
The cloud deer cross the road,

the main shipping lanes,

searching after it in the snow
it is that master
flake of all possible design

when compared in size. the pin

of the spin of the ocean.
of all migration
The course of the target

only makes all the objects.

5. You can stand in a field at night and hear the snows land.
The ton of an instant's impacts taken all but one,

and a sea cleared in silence for that's star:

and seas of the mirror moon

that radiant from, say, one crater

taxiing to time as copernicus.

That flake.
That sound.

The beacons, the landing lights strike me as spinal,

as physical shivers

the silence in which this traffic fields

its tar baby.

15
VI.

there are no stars in

the metropolitan
area skies
only air traffic.

twenty-one landing
lights. call
that mobile
the constellation Holding

Pattern. a modern
form in time
enough to save our navigation
of a maintained

in the nebulaic escape of bearing from here.

16
VII.

With the dead rest

spots in the oscillation
"an accuracy also,
a perfect note is

hit. An accurate physical absence.

The presence of music.
Or conversation
with one

I think is never missing

and I think is the right signature.
to have squandered an intelligence
on unspeakable watch

of that without tongue

VIII.

the cobra standing

drops down to strike
like the tabled elbow rolls the arm
down to the mark of the hand.

on the stairs
of the snake's crooked back
the fangs hang out
on the landing.

whoever's on the floor tonight

his chin on the concrete
will spot their scale as the last
conscious credential handed out

not any manipulation near to a signature.

In mesoamerica the snake's head touches

down to the ground. You are bitten
by birth. It isn't a trick.
You start
dying. How can anything kill
you ascending the steps
to the hour-
fanned feathers of skies?

Our pyramid is we've perfected

not being caught,
throwing folk skyward through the stories
of structures absently
as hope, elevators we prescribe in the voice
of those who stand watching

18
IX.

we can run out of our side

streets like out our ribs
between the buildings of owner
abandoned meat to see the dead star.

we can bleed as really as

humanly possible and prove nothing,
raise no more of the dead than good has
in our lifetimes. lyIng in the streets

are stars while their perfect point in shining

on the books without meaning to be fixed upon.
secrets which orbit decent decision
so distant from anywhere real

seeing to it it is only in our stars

19
x.
blood: someone says it's not
red until it runs
up and touches the air
loose.

it probably has the light

on different
inside and can cross on the knife
suddenly appearing through

appearances not even as particular as street.

the thought of. the light changes
passing through limitations
like human skin: candlelight thru fingers or yellow

vision the distress symptom of rattlesnake bite.

20
XI.

The fast storm sky wiped so suddenly

clear the stars shocked open
enough the Lights went grabbing clothes and
screammg The bore cloud white as the moon

a totally vertical moving aperture

was taking off up into open noctilucence
the head boiling Then the eye
passed and the storm laid straight into us

what it is like
in cliff dwelling is in the ceiling.
and the view out from under
the seal of the earth as an assurance

that this edge is sharply into air and that breath taken

21
XII.

the walls become whole,

you can throw away-
to live for longer periods without
- the packing boxes,

and you can keep

a few things too large to move quickly;
the floor is level, they won't lean
in that vortex down at you.

you can feel in the danger the danger

down a little turn achieving a vacuum
that seems to emit what world as falls in
as passing out of you but this is only where

it's gone there is no afford of measure.

22
XIII.

the builders baled chambers

with dry wall and stacked them
in the fields. the parquet
of contour

farming's planting
is taken to a wall
the shot hung
for aesthetic record.

the refugee fact

is that this is peace.
those who are its belongings
are stripped

ballrooms turned into body shops

23
XIv.

I pull a curtain of the great cats

around me I am singing
a nightsong in the siege of their forests
rammgonme

I've washed up human

& it is no good to me this hand
does not play but folds
at the heart not beating

the dark
spades in the meticulous thought
of fire. The were-freedom
the joker once beast and part man

votes part nigger on the cleanness of choice

14. about august, burning almost

black with the heated green,
the closer you get to the flaming autumn
the more silently white

iced you are getting. roughly,

the closer you get to something the more something
else it becomes, we say.
it's always something, you say.

People conceded, OK
you are exactly the same as I am, good
at this, maybe not at that. like me, OK
then sold and moved out of themselves.

those ghosts are as constant as season in the U.S.

24
xv. The Local/Elevations
or if the lips ever actually moved.
or in the middle of
an ambidextrous carpenter's
move if the benchmark

is on him or his work

the loose foot of the cauldron?
allowed to join repairs the union.
or if the deadliness of this new health

can bottom this crashing out.

or something?
imagine a unity even without even one
never-changing leg to stand on.

or if the new man's thickened lip, healed, fixed their remove.

IS. I resort to the mantle of my one free

vote and out from beneath any win
it may cast flies as from the eagle shadow
the mousey possibility of any

loyalty from the opposition.

its retreat has been backward through right and
wrong, philosophy, through god, through common
decency of individual man,

to founding and contract law, through fields

over rivers, down streets, through the finest
schools, infinitely transformational
against color like some gene of camouflage,

profound deceit rather than local hate.

25
XVI. No

The rocks have lines waiting

in them. The fielded conduct
of turn crusts
into the municipal

A geologic result.
finish after finish
woven into a carpet like track
stubs by times.

Not a patient design.

Most of our movement
forward has been laid off
The wire moves its stratagems.

The lines in rocks only move mined against brokerage.

16. and all the while the ordinary

white citizen is realizing
what the sabotaging
indifference to the achievements of the black
citizen means
to them the evidence of the war
kept coming in.
some indifference to them.
The words never regained their arrangement
After then
Everything had to be doubleminded
like the nigger had
had to do.
XVII.

a carnival of bald deer

their antlers lodged
in the walls as the forests
of heaven

for the angels who never leave the grounds

of the hotel.
the skins on the thrones
in the lobbies. ensconcionist

this litter's one with the least

hope this runt of everything
letting the property escape
escape the ruins of its solemn occasion. 0

then is this thing already over

I7. after having moved out of themselves

they probably moved into hope

hope has the least of everything no stores no

you have as much of nothing

of them in the afterimage

they leave as they have

they return to buy back

in in the coin of other image

concerns having lost

the understanding , as hope, of least
XVIII.

the rule of the spirits guesses.

our rules tear holes with firmness.
the water is a girl in algiers
a blue robe the nature of thirst.

the final tableau of her waist

is seven studies of clay fish
the dampened color of unglazed pottery
ascending as lark

-like evaporation.
sister. I see your face is pale.
it isn't funny how your dark skin
is capable, that unfinished leak

that lazarus water is unsweetened

XIX.

the fireworks mariner

took a quartet of winds.
sleeping everywhere at once
lay beauty.

the scarab he had swallowed

he would go inside
as blue secret.
if she were under the container of the sky

he would simply kiss her everywhere.

the straws of the unfinished
sun basket
the activities of living weave

to a small opening the moon. her inside

29
xx.
you have to run forward
and touch the terror of the offered
hallucination of light that packages
what life

you're going to get kicked

back from the voltage
you'll live.
I know some electrocuted

people who are fields

blown like the sun
on swaying configuration
of spaces their body holding

their fires out to you as what was charged.

20. Things that take a few blocks

to stop move across the street Bridge or no

One of the stories I'm most afraid of steps off

the platform two steps

ahead of the Metroliner. I thought it was me.

All express has no longer the reason to

whistle Among us,

right of way is sufficient address.

I'd thought that as music I should

wait for the listener But you know

blues give a museum to no reason to and waiting

30
XXI.

Their body holding

Their lines like their fires out
To you
as what was charged making

The field. They draw hot

attention hotter and hotter to
their cold eye. at the face
the storm on the empty

makes brilliant afterimages collect

of the disappeared
into inside into nothing
known

And that is what they say.

31
XXII.

I walk nights
in the falling gardens off
the edge of the flat earth
theory

I observe jump
as the sentence in a
step (that ditch
plunged that flood-futute tops

as endless spheres cannot)

turning
always up ahead. I work out
true in the disproved

information I will break in the morning

22. The enigma chambers are poses

cats put their bodies in and walk away

Their tongues play that fut, that dark

profane harp, about out hands

My hands pout not being able,

like salt if sea quit its solution

Dances table like water in the ground

We call it a journey a map

cats put their bodies in and walk away

They tear into pieces The wonder is finer and finer

musICians The black cats

XXIII.

sometime I'm going to have to

explain how I feel how
I've made my peace with lives
of the waters

how working in a public

aquarium night shifts alone
years
after the last high ground in the flash

flood in the amazon

after the orchids saved my life.
I have been stared at crying publicly
remembering crossing the street. Now a bird

of an infant dream asks for just such a hand over

had given blue feet to police siren such

that I thought the scream a jazz jade bowl and a step

And I get over

So severe a moment of border

was that character of black life moment

to moment

that taking it to the bridge which means that's it!

to jump was at a twelve-lane standstill

Even our screams cannot move

Cats put their bodies in and walk away undroppt.

33
XXIv.

As a boy there were no black boy

scouts as a man I hadn't learned
the contexts made any differences
in the danger

and I was dumb

at the waters signing away the boulders
rIsmg as I was used to
my father's business deals making him lost

in thought - behind his sly manners-

of us and our love of bicycles.
we covered that town like latitude
lines on a map crossing his warnings

like neighborhoods' color lines like him

This to the bridge music is our art of. period.

What surrounds or rather ghettoes all immediate point-i.e.

rivers and all that edges

off into loss - dance bridges,

a stepping over in the mid air that is

mid music. Dances tabled like water there are clouds

We drown in your dance, fathers,

not in the cold waters bordering separating

land from land

where we wept when we remembered

34
:xxv.
and now here I was in the amazon
headwaters calmly rising to run
at what is like a shot that is
the only consistency of sound) being fired

down from high in the office

scale gullies high on the mountain and building
titanist echoing run-offs into a drowning out
of this heat in the ground up route I was

breaking movmg on up this lower canyon

too far
and too frightening and the only
place on earth

for us who employ ourselves to the map of this world

The river hid the land so we know

it hid us on the edges also at night.

I wasn't where you end and I begin

I was all over discrimination

like jordan was some north fork from some cross

country nonstop flight: I couldn't see it

I know this country's race-catches by our heart

but I didn't know the faces. The catchers.

You would think I had known this

too is the side of a river these few blocks NJ

this land is salt

built up of the sediment of your black tears

35
XXVI.

it is a flash flood
and we're going to drown and we ran
ahead of the first rush and the slower rising
into the night until trapped in the lightning

we slept four men in two bags. I haven't said

anything about the wall of the orchids
inside the water
-falloff the floor of the jungle

two hundred feet

overhead or how I took the hand
of fish reaching into my stomach
and made peace

all I have said. And dived for the public aquarium 4 to 12

26. The step, within itself isn't difficult;

a lake, at one point,
of understandable stillness, at full.

The footprint on the water, filling.

Often you don't even notice the steps,

that is that each
is bridged by the falling body to the next,

discontinuous though the ground.

XXVII. Huge Spaces Apart We Still Look Each Other Face to Face
(Santa Barbara)

I had three people tell me

that day they saw me return
down the canyon as a hawk
I saw the same bird the same

time I saw the blue of the

sky straight through the open
shadow-work on the mountains
I lay in the golden fit

of mescaline sunning naked

on a rock overhang
above the canyon thinking
I have walked back to before

we left the earth

what are the flock that always lift down

into their shadow's valleys
out of the cloud of those bodies

but your step?

The settlement of grace locates from street to street,

takes the subway, flies through the air.
Black children jumping within the doubling wombed

wave propagations: double-dutch.

37
XXVIII.

when I saw it I thought I was hundreds

of centuries ago, and just this much a
this here and that there thing
is what goes on ago. form's clothes are

the dust on my nakedness I can draw them on

with my finger through it
on myself I can look at the hawk
and be that much drawn it as here

and that is what we saw

as one of us.
something never leaves us no matter
who walks up the canyon or what

civilization or shape we leave the earth & the others for.

Often you don't even notice

the end the great way ended;
the steps up the sky taken
apart for construction
materials;
though a tile of the floor
in each our houses resound
like split reward,
some advantages you can't cover.
you use
but some exchanges of change
throw plasma
fields over the fields over
for former slaves so no ghost or equation explains
Birmingham: Church: Double-dutch: Window: a new rose
walls off the ends of your buildings.
XXIX.

the variations on god

save their invention
for its human face.
the cornered dances

of the mouth confess

the antique ikonical rose
on its lips
had a day as cannabis

in the illuminated margins

where the specie arch-literacy
divines the daily
and common for the ritual light

to be given though as the rose Window, a match.

In the end, in the darkness,

in the smoke of the sent off messages
of candles and even finally bombs, you don't expect
- framed in the same venereal oval as mary's clothes,

except that theirs are simply two jump ropes-

four little girls; you don't expect four little black kids
to be lifted by a powder, by a speck like earth,
into the steps your government takes,

jumps. Blood rope.

39
At Any of the Bethabaras: Metempsychosis

they come in lives within doves within

lights within again and again cycles
to sit on their own shoulders in one
life the innocent's and the corrupting's.

they bring trouble upon themselves

like the spotless mirror
lake in the country brings down wild geese
in its season or in the city

the statue of glory its common pigeons. Such rains.

they hurry the stain through its entity event
laminae to the cleansing free
of its hollow. the infinite heart

of it all washed away

xxx. Red Shift
The summer drift's evening
submits a bid
on a list scene.
It catches. and moves

into the breakdown

accompanying a huge
purchase
A monstrous seat of value

in a sunset
Is taken off the truck.
A look at that size
VISIon fugitives landowners

who'd moved here to get away from colored.

30. They make the day follow the night

out of themselves
Children going to sleep by jumping
up and down in bed knowing they fly
Their shirts their nightdresses fill up
with their song sometimes the cotton sack
itself for clouds
they headed for the clouds go home and be free.
You have to believe you breathe
every black breath ever into you
it takes you the song
Says I'm gone I'm gone oh long, I'm gone.
The bottoms of my feet those are clouds
on a dark long-legged sky

41
XXXI.

influence it
was strayed very far
we misrepresent if
we place

a coarser sensibility
soft light and delicate texture
compounded of mist and light
slight shifts of color.

in subtlety of generation
time to qualify
as an antagonist
safely removed leading

a certain monotony in seeing

XXXII.

We had seen a first

Lady haul ass
over the trunk of
the assassination car

faster than split

second's
photography could catch. it
Looking for the spirit

leaving the body

We find character.
acting to refer
our scramble over our dead

to a common class. not exactly a pieta position

on all fours, boo kin'

43
XXXIII.

Information
planted on event like dope
to jail a cause
of this or effect that This

Doesn't get the connection.

Meaning-set
is less than we have mind for.
Leaving stuff

not booked through state parity,

that can't be thrown
into change for correction.
Asymmetry is the already in the happen

of character to making a representation

44
XXXIv.

one of the things we were

We were supposed to work for
and we would never see
like real gain or character

until disaster
Mixed what it pleased we have.
to stand for
from the beginning

One of the things we were.

was never there
but at an accident of moment with
Us and that never with us

is never added to to add

34- - never added to to add: moment that cannot be worked.

To the extent that our senses have moment

meaning is fragment.

The way we can leave this time

the photograph

is what before left us

the definitions of spirit and soul.

The questions of what was behind

the mirrors

the photographs answer

when we put them down and go about

45
xxxv.
something stretched out on balance
rocks overhead with so
little flight no one notices it
is predatory except

the shadow-reading
audience which as supply could care less
if that need's majesty
is endangered in its act.

high orders,
almost culturally flightless,
unable to lift us. the currency
of exchange between is madness's

eqUIpOIse in camouflage people as air pocket

Seizure by Simple Error

probably some anatomist knows why:

such violence is usually warning,
the result of which unheeding is taken
to them to study by taking apart.

the misjudgment of space rings the elbow;

the taken out of you blinds from the solar
plexus; the taken between the legs doubles
males into a place they almost reach

again in their female, the foetal pose

in the mummy wrappings of muscles in pain.
and the point where is touched off the massive
shock of the body is as shrinking

from autopsy as reaches of heart or spirit

or judgment destroyed in all even motion if hit.

47
XXXVI.

It is without example
It has no steps yet it is about the heel
As the brevity of sparrows
Or as tho elevators were stacks of dimension

of where stop goes

now flying across the present floor
so many leaves
of a paper on the whirlwind this flowering

grip of an explosion
lifted into years arranged in the vase collar
of your shirt
from one mine

you thought a seed & stepped into the ground

and your head goes off
XXXVII.

The notebooks are where the foot

soldiers are buried beneath
where the war is won.
A lot of this mind

is the flower yard you will have

to go down among and find
gone.
You are not kept up either.

Grave out of which inspiration were

to raise
your figure is cast on that very field
ground reverse and lives are opinion

changes which do not occur in space.

49
XXXVIII.

in this song the people are singing

the parts of the wolves.
the last seven stones to say
yes it is the moon and turn blue.

the dances of abusage have a sequence.

the taller and shorter addresses
of the skyscrapers on the avenues
of the misery on music. notation.

but it's the elevators who're anonymous.

whose wings regard the earn and the cross fictions
as as early as wax
and ringing ears in sophistication

of screw in this aural flight at suns turned out.

XXXIX.

A T-square regular
milky way
horizon
of interstate

headlights
cutting the desert
in its distance
from its night sky

moved the wolves' memory

some ninety degrees:
"So this is the moon
Again When I was dust

and this was in the making it was these dots."

51
XL. I Have Opened Six of Ti's Nine Knots

There was a piece of brown material

out on the table.
I try everything against my skin
for whether it wears

right with my color people.

I had bought string.
a weight up to six pounds
its horizon. its power

by powers would be
increased by the knots. a fetish
making about to release its mysterious actual
on VISIon vodun

has sent me nine ships in a tie-dye rag.

52
XLI.

the puzzle in bundles

is change.
you pit it together
it is one thing

(contracted in the tying rite of casting

a material over the head of
a space knotting it
with strings as it escapes into

the shrivelled cloth

offer it to the colors
open its horns & tentacles & it is another

I am tied up with my skin somehow

41. this is about songs

about when they happen about
pieces and absences
of connection about for no reason

this is about practicing

any gap any short for the jump
this is about going about
years with the live fragment

singing it over
and over for years learning its meaning
only as accuracy not an aesthetic
only as the most

maybe empirically correct song

53
XLII.

there is a deft brain talking diamond.

it is carbon. something
has burned.
I am unmixed about it.

something is brilliant.
at opposite puntles shit dealt uncut
the fixed facets' cool smashed the blinding reRection
the one in the other darkness

remember the do rag

that held a process together tied
on the head? the two piece
bundle dealing

harder and more expensive white quiet

54
XLIII. Simbi Petro Damballah La Flambeau

this volcano is the univalve

,
sea creature s structure
I forget the name
it rests on

boarding the unseen language

for the profane place
this creature rides on its licking up
its location. this univalve is this volcano

who ties up the land with new earth

with its hot tongue coldbloodedly.
the sea shall unwrap
from around the stiff bone of the lost

on the middle passage an ejaculant fetish layer:

43. To the extent that our senses have moment

meaning is fragment.

The way we can leave this time

the photograph

is what before left us

the definitions of spirit and soul.

the questions of what was behind

the mirrors

the photographs answer

when we put them down and go about

55
XLIV. The Seven Deltas of Shango's Wives

wrapping the land in new earth,

wrap me in your arms.
winding down a sediment
out of deaths for flower, settle me out

under your layer

for every inch I'm worth deep
knot.
I have come unloosened

from a chromosome division reknotted

to print in the standard of days my days unfurled
from that tie of the umbilical unpicked.
Now from tied deep in you by the flesh river seed

lay me down fanned out the mouth new manned land

XLV.

where day sun's long pile

for hair
casts the knot's divination
wear dey a dreadnought for hair.

in the head a matter is tied

that unpicked clothes time.
given nought light so for see through
wear dey dreadness far hair.

day monkey eye

come open now.
who no know go know.
where day ah dreadness?

far here come

57
46. after having eaten the rice and beans alone,
one piece of rice

after the dishes are gone

is the size. not the weight.

the sound crumbs of the sea

that the delicate

reason comes down to

feed on,

from the beaks that are clear of meaning to,

are brought back up into

the umbilicate ear

out of the seizures of the organ tides,

out of the breaks.

out of the storm, the jazz.
INTERVAL AND FINAL DAY'S CONCERTS
Interval

When the plane crashed I was snatched

fast at the navel until I hung
from the seat belt and then I laughed.
Birth snatches you one life to another.

dislocating as death is the upset

the move to bethlehem means birth is,
is the apple-burst,
the turning birth unthreading eden a bite again.

The midwife calls it the apple: My daughter's head

snatches my life out of me into my father's towards me
to her. We laugh. Snatched by biology's cords,
by lines, by responsibility's leash and my tail's urge,

I've been around. dislocating a little from each by each

61
I. 12.b.obs.OED

(to know or to be read in)

suppose you read in

say like law or history The New York Times's
This Week's Concerts
in aural rorschach. carmina burana then

and caramel burr insectivorous sweet of light occurs.

moths and anti-crime light. and how you feel about leaving
a three-month-old unattended keeping your hand in
this short an interval, a current fixture.

the out of place-ment, the come up short cut-paste, the edges.

the abruptness so familiar now as to be
fluency from next to
next becomes

I.I3 suppose to read is as to study divination.

II. Isolating the Nurturent Reflex to Sound

a picture an idea a question transfixed in the short

of interruption strobe
rhythms that an infant's limitations period by need.
inextinguishable variation on forgotten

rite that five hundred miles inland and out

of signal range read and wondered
what a pacific two-thirty-one must sound like.
perhaps november steps.

or that all these stops that pull you up short short each
a different synapse
means the current crossing takes up moment outside
as in lena and that different place incompletes fragments

Chance is specie our daughter our mind

III.

knowing the music

never comes into
it.
the music's fact is
a glossolalia
sound's meaning.

record jacket
-cover art's point
cuts its own
musIC
different from that
the magnetic pick-up
fit is on.

Point in these words

takes up the turning
subject
after the silence after
what was meant last.
At renewal.
A needle
not so played on meaning
as on movmg
rescue from blank death
death's and other words' subject
radical.
As many names
for the same deck as games,
as human call is
figurature
upon those acids.
And once in person,
Iv.

labyrinth is a real route,

densest in the middle of the floor.
there most crowded with loud intents,
and deepest from any door.

going in circles would be the same but for

that's being at closure. the stillness and the turn
on repetition is missed here
head-on without the recourse to driving pattern,

to memory. Sense becomes the multiple spot

of collision. phosphene spiders, talk as
variable as the trembled focus makes face.
echo. Where alternative interrupts alternative

no idea lives long enough to see

through and is barely music
V. Photograph: The House of the Poet

I see the house of the poet,

weird and quiet, right in its out of place, across
a wheeling field come off some wind's cart
that tilts up into fury's trees above the house

and think a black man ought to have such

signs in his cross-
roads taken pictured too landmark status:
a small writing desk in a quiet corner

won deep in the mass of no less subject

than white tree worshippers of paper
their cannibalist sacrifices
flipping through them offered that order

be maintained white where his ink darkened those sheets

66
VI . ... Apart from What Each Other Is ...

you can see goethe's desk

beethoven's piano freud's couch.
my brother can show you my father's best ring,
and I can my mother's, my grandmother's

vase on top of my manuscript closet.

and I had wanted ...
My desk: I had wanted every black grandchild's vase
to be taken on on

that desk and that desk stay in our hands

like a plow singing hold on hold on.
Silently brightening your corner ...
But we are sold

goods apart from each other

VII.

the fairy tales were over and had grown

explanations and had lit connections
to sense like pubic hair. torches.
but she had grown huge

breasts she does not want

except to stand up wide legged
to the toilet and fist them out
until they're dry and free. her brain a clear

mammillary structure crypt and dry.

she wants to take up what's her from endings more
recent than seas and earth. the nerves' story
that start is not upon once, and time can take up

anytime. and body any story from any cover.

68
VIII.

They say when

off the solid
ground of all nowhere
a chill steps

into shaking that bog of nerve

-tangle the back
muscles like mosses fire
III (the ignis fatuus

through low spore clouds)

that someone has just
walked across your grave.
Whole armies have swept back and forth

across this trigger hair of property this year

IX.

Ours is a foolish fire

we bring you
into , children. The light
clouded with all these each others' weather

of that fire itself weathered

safely or not. ultimately not. The light, you see,
is of kind, is
of way Ours is a foolish fire done

out into air with mirrors even still going out.

I look
like my father you look like me My father
ashes over in his lungs colder to cancer

I heard him say god how I love them to us under his breath

70
Whose sleeves
is an opening that became a kind

Like it dividing and indifferent blue

could be a kind of poem like blues a music

We count too few returns capable of

being kept time,

other patterns of recurrences than mathematick

of being capacity.

The clouds so few they would rattle

around in the count on your one hand

The increment like fingers

Here hold this

But whose sleeve

doesn't have a hand in this. Jesus wept

71
x.
That everything can go

(Simple change)
And wrong not so singular
nor infrequent a stop
that you could commute by heart

the line from sentence capital

birth to death period.
Just Right Straight time deliverance
carries the structural sentence. Everything.

As hearings, the voice takes these unequalled stands

against an odds immense as sky like this were air.
What is this? What is the air after?
Only audience and cry leaving? Then everything goes?

72
The Aerialist Narratives
CHAPTER ONE
I. Aerialist Narrative

Written into the drip accomplished

form of action painting the lyric
for people who walk on strings

There are photos of people standing

on the canvas
in mid-air a line ahead of the painting.

Of what happens,
lines of that are gone,
not simply missing

Those lines of how those

lines that are there got there
the line in mid-air

from the can to the surface

its moment like a line written
in that falling hand of the northern lights.

But what can anyone have read,

supposing it was night,
by the light of Icarus or any of us escaping?

77
II. Taking the Print

See night in the sunlight's starry reflection

off the water darkening the water
by contrast.
The dark hiding in the water
also hid us in thedver at night
Our crossing guided by the internal sight
on our darkness
the ancient graphis
and - from this passage of abductions and escapes-
this newer imprimatur of the river
cut deep in the plate.
see in the river the ripples'
picture on the surface of the wind the lifting of the image
has taken at the deeper face
the starry freedom
written in the milky rivery line that pours
the brilliance of that image from a depth only black
night fleeing across this land
has to voice.
 III. Heading: The Landing

The beacon fires, the hidden fears;

the runway lights, their nature's lies,
the country's lies:

will arrival even be any

base left to touch
once these few minutes run out
their approach?

Is a way in air so clear and orderly

as the light is,
drawn as a landing about the ground?

Voice closest to closure of the journeying

is one that deserts us, the one called silence,
leaning in the glass against its image,
as if all diagram is a delusion of process.

All these voices come out to meet us in this

ancient seeing in the end of distances
this fearing:
the glow of the coming city
on the horizon is it burning;
is this music or screaming
all these voices cast out to talk us in?

What if in the final

minutes of your heavying
descending

the landing strip kept lying

changing you back
into the air the way a white

backs away in anger when you approach with the directions

you've been asked?

79
 In like manner the entire society remains
up in the air black unaffirmed mirage
a mountainous range teetering on its own
upside down
peak denying what it's risen of.

Solid rock lifting itself into the air

on its own heated reflection illusions of separation
that anyone trying
to place down to integrate into goes also up
in the confusion.

Ours is a particularly hard landing always

trying to correct to an abandoned position
You run out of the fuel for holding
back

the fires of arrival

the few survivors

those who packed to die
maybe raised

like images
of smoke
slapping our faces with our color

a wafer from the stack

of all our waiting number

a cup snatched
before the take too much
to

A kind of conclusion
that's cleared away. Like wreck or sin.

80
Iv. Waterfowl Landing: It Lifts to Close
(for Ron)

The hundred wings float down the furrowed air

to the lake, come in motionless as seed
and make the surface bloom
that way
that drops of fattened summer rain
open against the pavement
tulips' petals
like wings lift to close on landing

81
V. Properties

After some days-

and not because of the dirt-
it really looked
like a kind of earth
and not the fallen sky it had been at first
snow.

Whether the vengeful one

were the ground or the sun-
then, whether thats
stamp or kiss were a crash or press
into that print
an attempt coins on survival,

- commemorative myth,
the spun tales of these genes-
whatever, ours, like water's,
is not material fatigue.
Up and down time after time
how many migrations
has ice made home
to water?

The verdant tropical mists' drip

tears gathering into the cold
bloody rivers of the atlantic
grinding ashore
captured into the plantations' white glacial field
the rending melt water's burst
toward a north star state to state
of matter

pressed upon us
our material does not fail
the strict coinage It would be different
if the investigation team had overlooked
a piece of the wreckage in the staring face
ofIcarus
Black with the roads' dusts,
the atmosphere, solid, on the ground
turns into a pool, the
ground's mirror,
and picks up the sky again.
VI. Cape Journal: At Sand pae

it matters less
than as long as
their shapes last

that you call this

a cloud that a whitecap;
and less

than either, this

answenng a name
yours mme or

the how many names

of snow: flat, shifty, six-faced
cold
families of New Jersey

I felt,
for less than a wave
washing over, why
the hermit life heals,
talking together
after so many years.

This morning, walking alone,

fortunate guest walking
the blank beach,
I remembered
- because I had listened to both of us -
I'd had nothing to tell.

And that is to say, thankfully,

Paul, I also have no memory of Rutgers.
3

the wind erasures

on the dunes,
polished unlike our
confused images

these removals are the composition

clearing
the principle of composition

the sand clearing the water by the end

of the wave
the caps clearing the horizontal
water into the air a moment

and contained as in the glass ball of that moment the coast

and its raining afternoon
and the waves in a fog of dune grass here

No one had yet left any steps

in the sand, no old suggestion
of limit as

to my own locomotion.
I could be flying.
- though only in this direction.

The return would make this clearer,

put it on the ground,
put it to measure, a step

like music This should explain

a feeling of being fortunate more
than just the beating out the distance one

in front of the other.

5

simply because we have forward

facing us
in which we see these things

the beach grain

by grain moving the length,
walking the length of itself

Robison Robinson
Roberson Robertson
Robeson what does it matter?

none of the crackers

keeping records
on us could spell, either.

I am clear.
the length of myself I have moved
the melanin color to color

so when daddy decided

to open his business
by filing according
to white people's spelling

86
none of his brothers had any
of the same
names
stupid crackers

everyone remembered them

telling you shut up
you couldn't spell
hell with it then

look in my goddamn face

and see
my damn name
VII. African Ascendancy

ascendant an ancient
use
for ancestor

mine ancestor is
seen upon my skin
a light that color is

upon the surface

mine is an Mrican
ascendancy in sight
at sight a burn

If yours were
the eye of the sky
what would the source

be of

your look upon me,

what would it grow,
what would its color be?

How do you burn?

88
VIII. Research at the Interstice

This is the Sargasso Sea

where the mile kelp is the muscle fiber
of a body so huge we are,
in this hull, at the membrane of cell exchange,

we can pass as just overboard

into another stream,
carried as riches
to the new world.

Up above my head

the dripping sky

and the rising deposit-built wave
that the darks disappeared
from the light down

into from their shore

into a cave a hold
carried treasure
We could surface from' as from a wall

deeper and richer than memory

the marble carries of surf
the netted fractures the spittle
of froth We are only running

nitrogen fixation experiments

a sample of each depth
in a glass ball flask
off the North Anlerican Coast's

former slave states

to see what the light
reaching into the dark sea
has made of this
IX. The Motorcycle Crossing

Sometime it's all in

how you get seated
in the road of the morning This morning

I was sitting right

at the desk kicking out
paper like miles

and like coming up over the top of a hill

into sun or air or clear
of the high road roar

I laid her over right there.

You don't think you run over them

and snakes can rope up
into YOut spokes
and throw the bike.

It takes nothing, a stone.

So ain't nothin happenin
in the office and you lay it down
mean it
all going down inside.

Secretary step in you

sitting at the desk unannounced a
silver veil of tear weaving down

your face a landscape

singing quiet to yourself
Every little thing
Gonna be alright.
 No snake no slick no stone
I just laid it down.

Late afternoon summer

the long rhythm of soft running
water and its silence,
you could hear the wake of the collards
parting the water.
The long black lines,
her fingers, passing through.

When we were growing up you know

those sisters at the sink
in the kitchens baptizing those greens
suddenly break
down into tears jump up singing
shout
Don't worry
Don't worry some day
It a be alright

must be in my blood
blood my blood

has had to lie in

absorbing the lives
we were losing bathing in screams

The tide rhythm blood

and filth took on
rocking in that deluge
those ships cupped to our god for drink
must be in my blood

91
 Given our own blood to drink
Bloods of the hold
Bloods of the fields
drying in those furrows
through our feet

as up through any root

blossoming at the tip
of our touch into the cloud
boll held an instant then sacked
the bitterness of this fruit
clothing a nation

leaving for work this morning

in new blood a new press
the rungs on the upward ladder
treacherous
as the deepened sea.
X. The Comb

The water,
dean, beached and pressed
and laid out in a pool

like for a sunday

the church in the water
the morning holds.

The morning pulls

through things
Seaweed comes out in the comb of black bone

The morning picks up a shiny black stone

greased shining with simple water
A day of redemption whatever its word, its name.

Out of the kinky tangle of waves

the small, balled curl of a pool,
small quiet huckleberry of a pool.

Someone screamed, "Land!"

When we looked at the horizon everyone wept.
We had crossed this as though it were a drop
from our forehead

No more than a ferry commute across

an urban river but in mind a toss
dreamed at the hand of thy neighbor making news

chasing a kid into traffic

as his offer of that other shore his aim
for you

93
XI. Given Way
(to Tom Mellers)

Flying isn't always that best

you can do left
behind, that over and above
spoken of.

Sometime you have to return over

the river as the limo driver
after having

seen off a burden of chastening

envies from ]FK,
have to,

though driving, passenger a sleek

abandonment,
and lightened to nothing of your claims
have to

drop your gloves as though a will

from the wheel,
drop the rein that points the way less
than the barn itself, the throttle

less than place in tight formation

taking us on in
flying

Not that transcendence, not a grace;

though, like it,
no choice, an automatic
pilot

how it follows the road has brought

us to the bridge
on the fly of crossing and not
the stop of jumpstreet
off.

94
 And if,
as you say, Jessye Norman was smgmg
Jerusalem
at that instant and the structure

of the bridge, in crossing,

painted trusses of Franz Kline blackouts
on the lighted city,

Hying is only
how you've seen what you had to
stand on
and not had way
to look.

95
CHAPTER TWO
I. mblemati.t:xt

We don't associate
arrows with flying
anymore. For us, with guns,
they point.
They gauge
they speak the distillation
- that direction-
of once flying.
They haven't returned, in a sense,
to earth.
We are the flash instead
that precipitates from flight.
Even most birds
are a dead issue.

We don't take the road

as a way, but as door
for its shortness.
For us with our elevators
to make of our horizontal
basis concurrent
spaces,
the road is, at most, standing
in line to be through.
As door to our next,
the road keeps glazing
titles of changing entrance,
such that now when we think of life it is
as standing before a huge time or directional sign.

99
II.

stepping through I
mean getting on a train
plane a subway one place
sitting down
getting off someplace else is
so natural a sequence
of positions to us
we forget their addi60n

that step choreo

graphically speaking could not have
possibly arrived us at
this location alone I
mean we dance
but in formations in steps
partnered to sequences left
outside

I mean gaps like natural

limitation having
stepped across because
not snakes we fall from step
to step finitely forward
towards that end of ourself always at
our fingertip type limitation
we run out of breath at

each word said

then not said there is that
Then there is this created limit
not what is hidden by that us as
horizon but what we hide
with eyes open inside out
of sight what we deny not the unknown
but the willfully not

100
 knowing that
is stepped over because less
intestine than we are shits
we step over
pieces we leave out
of the trail strung to sing our
histories what has come of
peoples we have eaten we
no longer see
We have eaten we

IOJ
III. Heron Riddle Flashback

I answer

Summer and three quarters

of an hour past seven
in the evening

But I could tell what it

was by the silhouette
I knew the answer

to this shape great heron

a blue passing over

these garden apartments
from the lakes

of one corporate campus

to another along
US 1

2 heron

the first one

I'd ever seen you showed me
at Pymatuning in
Pennsylvania
about seven one mornmg
after
we drove - Catherine, you, me-
after tripping
to see one of these beauties

the neck
poured back upon
the bowl, the body;
the legs extended
after, the air-
handle;

102
 a tablespoon
from wch the wings spill flying
slowly,
a heron.

3 silhouette

time also is only a riddle

Of shape as in how we try
to animate the frames, the takes,
the shot we are given
how we try
to piece to life,
between dying and that concluded
out of only meaning,
a master if only of tape

Mistaking for this sequence

of pieces that whole of water
in the river where ever crossed,
lacking that started finish
to journey (in which all that lifts
must land) of gravity,
what is it . . . The silhouette of the bug
helicopter collects
behind the spoon

in the folds in the lattice

of meanings that a wing stirs
the overlay fixes
one of a combinant of likenesses wch each
manifoldly persist beyond
its analogous moment miscreant chimerical
Stilled heron whose next instant is head throbbing
thunder chopped into beats a medal music,
whose white is blue is an unseeable

103
green whirls its wings around above its head
speaks in blank concussion-
bomb balloons the dust updraft
like wing curls down the floated spoon
calmly lifting through a dragonfly
the swamp mist northern pennsylvania
What is it imagery of any longer
to have pushed these defiances we popped
the smoke the brilliant buttons
opened the flowers what is it

when craziness you saw far off as

human gets is in line in succession
to office, not a distance you had stretched
atrocity, not a vet's disability you see in,
but tried guilty and pardoned business
What is it collecting behind
the files collected on
everybody and still the bankrolling
the agents left outside to kill
little bird-leg children
going against the background to church.

4 US 1

They told us
this shit would come back
to destroy us

now how the proudly guilty are ashamed

we were the innocents, the paranoiacs

embarrassed we made only sense and not

some something more unseen than the violence

openly whitewashed with the public face

of government against us

they told us
this shit would come back
5

where the commuter copter gets confused

with the heron with the rotation state

side the bombing that the beat carries

out at the crux of Jimi Hendrix with

the Princeton corridor air traffic

shuttling the white boys into office
Audubon collections

on the wall indistinguishable

from a reserve vintage privately flown in

and a reserve US helicopter on weekend
maneuvers a cocaine spoon a dragonfly a heron

government heroin flying in proven on the wall

and you'd suppose not to be confused

the wanted with the stamp

6 riddle

I got your letter

It didn't make a lot of sense
Are you alright

Nothing escaped you no

abandoned you yes nothing
abandoned you that's it

You only pretended it was

imagination
easier than to say your eyes were open
 We know there is
something
that is not an image

that we
turned quickly enough
and could see with us

106
Iv.

The skipping stone stays out of the water

The standing up in the boat crossing
the delaware,
the band-aid commercial parade
of drum, flag and fife, the iwo jima
collection, things that are terms like
four little girls flying

around inside an exploding church, people

being washed down
the street with water,
dogs in the saint george and the dragon
art history position
on command on top of women
the camera catches, the skipping stone

stays out of the water

long enough to cross over
concurrence to accountable term
but not over the deaths of those who go
under say just prior the altared shore
who are entire now. complete, not ideal.

A prediction of that bird iridescence,

the spot of a single reptilian scale,
is passed without going the full length,
to one down the sequence suddenly
across the looped catastrophic
plane of locomotion.

Tossed off on blank sand,

the line in a sidewinder's hand
explaining lifting off the continuum
of the earth, explaining leaving one surface
for another to arrive elsewhere
on the first in time

107
 to take up the percussion of living
on the one hand and have to
strike death into its dance down the other,
any distance between coiled tightly
around the rattling emptiness to drive a sense
like that gourd's hidden singing of beaten time

from inside secret singing

to fly the round walled the seeds throw
like bones the steps our coiling hips
our music leaping off
this plain like light a dance
that forward takes us higher

How if stepping skips those places,

how then dancing flies. how
matter admitted and explained lifts from its lie
its term of flight accountable to be done
something with a stone touched down to resurrect
prediction to a dictate
to organize our missing and from that ghost create

those backs of the waters

we cross upon. those black shadows no
that black apotheosis
in the simplest shared indigenous american things.
already. an Osiris
the middle passage has brought home along
what rivers deltas and mississippis mean to u.s.

But this is what is always skipped

this is the lift the country gets to get
moving the term
mickey mouse renewed each generation
evokes your hugs What face stirs your concern
like one of color except to lemming separation, to out-
distance
is renewed

108
 V. Cinquain de Lune

Why do you think the moon is lying?

What has it said
That you've found otherwise?
Is it that white? Is it that
White?
VI. What the Return of the Lines Meant

We only move in close

on strangers' backs,
we make primate approach
only on line
anywhere near
what all our senses are what all
our like's perceptors are
about.

And all those whites

who'd never darkened any line
opened to light through blacks
fall in behind
the shadows, back
like their fathers don't admit
is where he got his
first,

is where he stood
when lightness pulled him out
of turn
ahead
as the official course
of things aparted.
Now it's all back hard time
in line again and not together
not familiars this time either.

IIO
VII. Chorus at Ohiopyle
(to John Seidman)

The trees on the other side of the rapids didn't

impart the peace we'd set off our escape for
They all leaned to one side like kids in the back
seat pretending to take a fast curve

only it was the wind Or it was the track

the eye rode on the waves that, when it got off, slipped
into the ocean that illusion the land
no longer still nor solid the borders laughing

Or too much dope Or promised lands awash

in the tangled rivers of that wider water,
everything crossed over and the landing here
that sharpened our fixes 'til we see displacement

bend tree to tree the agitation of direction

smearing away all settlement and peace .

. . . Always going someplace

else getting out of what we'd found
ourselves in that too horrible
we were always what we had
to change if you weren't
you died jumping out of boats
running onto points of iron arms
landing unsirened even longer under limbs
of trees growing up free base wild
enough to throw open the carbonous streets
cities of the hardest material.

So we have forward facing us the trees

on the other bank of the rivers
point in their rapids betraying any line to.

We were the point

that was our trust in our line
was our lining so beautifully the pockets for

III
what was the line of our dancers
that missing this point sold us
out of each our cycle

west
what is this emptiness not one
this plural not mandala

I have to step in
here I have to skip something stop
here to tell you voice by voice

point in the line of thought in the sentence the poem

to the extent it tells us who we are we are betrayed.

As much as cost as geological

location as space marked out for play
the proximity of people not me built
my house where I'm at what I am within
distance to do my culture what I pick up
to say back is set up by how far apart
I keep from a subject just this kind of thing
keeps persistent I elect reps who say back
that isn't so and hold out
a hand with nothing at my end I'm bound to hold to
the line I draw I draw back to what drew
up the ship and my position on it
I don't understand why I'm sold into line
- I had a contract - headed for these skids

From where the rocks were now I could look

to where they had moved from, I could see
the formation of the canyon a whole

face shearing from the wall dropping in steps

we switchbacked down as road, ledges we trailed
down into the river scree lapping its own pile into

112
structure, slide outraced by its cloud pendent motes of
slab terrace gardens behind the front running
boulder breaking the ribbon of the course

of the river where I sit in a wave

shaped in the rock to a seat by water
I can see the falling into place

and I am riding it
all afternoon boulder mid-flight its skip

I get up walk the aisle of the valley

come back to my seat ride some more
I walk up to the head of the rapids-
On my back, feet first, I paddle into
my seat in the rapids my ride on the flood

Instant the catch of the current snaps me in

in the motion I hear all this laughing
rioting in the flow but voicing softer
than the hiss under the roar of light
bubbles tuned taut at the molecular

level traces of ancient dissolution

lost african all these bodies in the one
body that is water we go over
dip after dip under thrown back up laughing.

All the lines we have lost seem to have come

to stand in this line are these the reunited
spirits riding the amusement of this park

on hailing waves of hands all prodigal

brightly names balloon up to the surface
a hushing sound above it all being tapped

II3
or is it a twitch of muscle on the shoulder
from the cold of the water gIVen
some grander answer by death you can't hear

above the rapids They are here

not the windy lake wherein
but just as grand not

They are at the molecular level

Not at our amusement. At home

II4
 VIII. Gnosis

Not that it's one of your own

staff your own people lying against you,
but that the cramped hold is within you
now always an edge

Not just the rough day,

not the whips of the weather, the overthrow
of the waters against you,
but the anything

you can't take it

has the condition of the ships, the fields,
the escape
now,

you think about it,

you can feel the mornings we would lose you.

II5
IX.

The birds put inside

what the walking felt divide
their going,

what - without that void,

the ground between step-
brings walking to its cul-de-sac.

The birds put nothing in their bones

In their bones
how nothing frees them how nothing lifts

them up What your own

people never wanted you to have to know

and feel sorry for you if you don't

takes you to the river told you

wash away your tears tears wash away

your tears are the rivers and even they will

wash away

I was afraid
I find out what it mean
it a be alright

what it mean what it meano

mean it mean
it won't no and it won't

matter at some point

even that
be alright

n6
 the right
build in

their bones
how nothing frees them
how nothing lifts them up
The birds put nothing in their bones.

II7
X. Elegy for a White Cock
(after Mei Yao-ch'en, ca. I002 - Io6o)

With suburban real estate rising

anywhere it's snug up

the butt of the rural,

the roosters who used to

make all those promises

are fewer and fewer.

Lifters of the dark, nightblooming labia,

Comers of the light, et cetera.

Any birds you can call are less.

Call them messengers or angels,

flight or ring announcers in the laddered wrestling

up through dumbness ...

Our deepest carriers in specie planes

go down, blow up like birds nor angels never

could admit, get hijacked ...

And the unit

of the morning, measure of temples,

how could it
matter to a plumb-line fired by we unfeathered

that in its infancy cracks an orbit whip

off] upiter' s
huge head? matter

to this shining semblance we

spot in a glide for setting

u8
down, eastern's early coach at dawn,
our morning star?

that silent cock of the spectrum,

up at our changed limit ...

Our fires once our horizons. Now out past stars,

what started as the simple reds of roosters.

**

But
There is no one from this apartment who you'd expect
to hear morning chantideerly with any sense
since wake-up radio and traffic
reports
abruptly shortened as by the neck
by live transmission of one crash
into the Hudson off 44th some mechanism loosely acting
your fox.

But that is gone too that red too. Some tale of water dosing
about it, white as ice because, in a moment
the last attention failed. Everything
got across
that water in its brief window as footing
but the loss at the end, the end of the red
tail touched down with cold white. Like black blood is
in the western light where it touched the sea.

**
old farmer, poor as dirt, maybe older even than dirt is,
surely older than these kind of stories,

had a rooster got to be his pet, his friend .. one night

he hear it holler, something had done snatch it ..

II9
he run outside to chase whatever .. he end up saying, "who
could use cinnamon and ginger on him now?" that exactly

that exactly where we at.

**
Our wolf at our door or earlier
our cave entrance or closer in such distances
of time to us just outside our fires,

a wolf of minute just night's side of ebb,

those barely eyes twice the morning star as cold
and more unmoved than heavens were ever wished,
fixes a hunger into blue hairs
and disappears in this direction
as a day.

The cock crow which rules that night hungers have eaten
all that earth has turned
up, the meaning of wolves dissolving already
into light, the quick of foxes'
fire just so much flesh, so much material
of suns,

recalls the sides into position.

That exactly where we at.

Where, as that call goes down, every revenge, each justice

unteturned by then to the balance
we thought we made as a fire, it dawns
each scheme again that these are periods not any
understandable score
of resolution we can study;

where, around a fire we thought would keep the fox

the wolf the chaos off
like the timekeeper crowing on our side,

120
we sit with loss, the unreturned or absence for timekeeper
and only the summary embering to study before,
far on the burning horizon, foreign pictoglyphs

begin arriving written in the broken dazzling.

**
You could wake up with the set still on,
still in the process of drawing
the pictureless, blue brightness from the dark
through the antenna it seems

until, too much, a clot of day hangs there.

Vacuumed tightly to the teats of the antenna,
a blue static backs up from the little window
into day, pressure after frameless pressure,

emptiness after emptiness.

Halting, in that counter-telescopic
squeal of static, our star
entropies into place

among the waves, the blue echoic waves

that thin and feral lips of the event horizons
pull upon and break along
a spectral line like shore at sea at dawn

clear as the line of the antenna is

the perch for birds
to finish the extension of their wing
come down to this

**
Birds are taken in through the t.v. antenna
to the screen. Only the squawks of pain

and the shout of eyes in the darkness against

some fox of broadcast.

121
Some favorite and antique hope is silenced .
. . . You lose your damn rooster,
we lose our commons' farm to suburban imageries,
then lose our images to speculation in returns on anomie.

The land, the vane, its bird who names the sun up, lost
in a traffic of the windshield's focus, lost, the morning
star,
the very morning itself.

What spices could you use on this death

when it in every pot is tuned empty

an iron bell in your stomach spooned against?

See how the thinned blood day uprises

hungry over the hills in reply.

122
 XI.Onze

Not birds touching down,

no petals falling.

The sharpened stars are

throwing weapons,
metal cold.

Moon, disintegrated in light,

countless escape ships of invasion

land its image

on each branch, each lawn,
all the roads

closed. Snow.

123
CHAPTER THREE
I.

A widow suckling
the master's field,
bent over the rows,
the oddly backward

trajectory of the bolls

of milk
she runs with her hands,
the cotton spilt

from one breast on the ground

she fingers each drop
into the sack plumping beneath
her other.

Up on black mountain
a child will spit in your face.

127
II.

bomb
bullet

trajectory is only a line

someone has to draw it

or pull it out
and into the papery fibers

of skin, the responsive

skin where the slightest
initial mark,

the silvery slip of a kiss, the trail

writ of a stick, a whip, the ink
dip,

sets up the conditions

of the art

living the line

drawing, dowsing a delineation of
the human

so I thought the
silver lining was the inside
ofacloud
that flashed like that

little leg she shows when she sits down

her robe opens across the plains of the bed

it is the outlining
of light

around the edge of that dark

cloud between her legs instead

128
and the inside of a cloud

that slicks with mist the divination

tools of beings mostly water
briefly written

129
III. On the Line

People die on the phone

Severe thunderstorms of guns

Snubnosed silverplated

the lining on the ground positioning

the body

the cloud the written

something about how to contain
a cloud

how to carry air without a wrapping

ofleaves of houses torn
from their foundations loose papers

the spring arrivals of smells

gliding song
birds

the city in a basket the jewels

of its lights in plastic
bags used
to house any evidence

Lanes are contained within the yellow line

The yellow line of the sun the broad daylight mark

Wave-length maps out the colors

A city that chases itself into traffic death

escaping a band

of the spectrum
a black body erased across the tarm someone
with a ball of mason's chalk recalls

13 0
 into an outline on the night ground
uncoiled, the breath drops its wrapping
the target that was skin the arrows

the flights
the beautiful
cloud

The potent balls

of his eyes turned off,
the whites turned up,
are bagged.

*
Too sharp to look directly at (not the brilliant lining out
of cloud form against background but
The line drawn through us (a different
marking off of conclusion We are looking at
Struck by lightning
on hold writhing in the news
waiting on the open connection with extinction for news
of help

a call connected at the moment

of birth
in nonsense and over time

what adheres to that screaming

is language torn off
a background a neighborhood shot up

our single mother

a speaking color
a cloud

131
of event wrappings
dropped into those plastics of form
that the moving line around one holding the chalk
picks as evidence off the dosed ground of the other.

*
Rain

13 2
 Iv.

There were these

mistakes between the steps'
walk continuum and the reign

of the consequences
of absence bam a lack
lapping misstep that break
the fall of

a man into rising from

a crash
land or the skip free

of the takeoff Seemingly spontaneous

power to lift off
to change is deep as religious

transformation as off
the water
the stone the moon
the bird of spirit

flashes People
do suddenly lift into the sky suddenly open
Not in this state

133
 Punishment was supposed
to teach society
(teach "them" society)
But the teacher taught only
punishment
And when the punished suddenly

had learned

The change here was not achieved

by punishment's
format, not by the teachers
or any agents of punishment, but by
the punished
themselves, by those supposed

lacking.

When what is professed to be lacking

was achieved,
when that responsibility,
that manhood, which rehabilitation
for once had actually achieved,
occurred,

state troopers were brought in and shot them.

134
 There must be
space between the trajectories
of the rain

of police machine gun bullets

that could trace the shape of a man
escaped
into more than smoke

from these
attempts to stand for
some kind of decency in living

even if it is come to
within
the meditation upon mistake

some country
the citizens of attica
had learned to re-think for all of us
and expected

rather than the barrel

that the nation
stood around the rim of
shooting into

them

135
v.
And 0
When I fell down on the ground
When I opened my eyes
standing over me
the light of a long freight bearing down on me
around his face one of the gandy dancers
hitting a lick of the horizon's flying rail
organizing a whip into a riding he opens
a place in line for me
lifted in the physics of that singing
rail I am
looking down at me
I lay down
When I opened my eyes
standing over me
their floated forms burned to invisible
black bodies hiding stars they lie
the ropes of phosphorescent nebulae
around their necks moving like tie
beams slatting the black night
sky into which from earth I hang
looking down at me
I lay down
When I opened my eyes
standing over me
that start star

trail slicked with the bloody

feet of stealing themselves

away
looking down at me
I lay down
When I opened my eyes
standing over me
one of the road gang in
chain seen or unseen
each his hair a rocky ore that burns
into iron that splits the stone
that splits iron chain into fires of spark
 flying free I am become
not just one of them but that one
looking down at me
I lay down
When I opened my eyes
they were rock under my feet
I lay down
my road

*
when we made the middle passage didn't we
walk the waters didn't we
have the waters paved with the skulls
of our grief for each other didn't we make it
on ourselves.
when we crawled under the mason dixon
didn't we jump the fence over jordan
didn't the river re-bed behind us and
turned blood because the bloods wouldn't tell
didn't we make it to this one side on our other.
on ourselves didn't we
get put up when we went back down
home didn't we hide in each other no hotels
that we stood uppity a chance of gettin
shot didn't we walk
on the shadow years later of emmett children who did
didn't it make your step
higher than just to walk.
didn't the westward push opening
the country turn middle passage trying to shut
us out panicked at the plow flat and hardness
of our feet having stood on each other
didn't we open the rock like our hearts
didn't it bleed too to yield too to eat

didn't it

didn't it didn't it rain

didn't it rain

137
VI. Handed the Rain

given to
look into the bowl
of sky

for it to fill
with future
see it turned

upside down on the grass

see the ladle pass

hear the god underneath

calling his inside
the heavenly vault eternal

how that bump

reminds me how we saw it
once

from the underside of

Nut a mother's belly

see dissolve
against her vast ground
the drowned cloud of black

lives the solution's population

of rain crowding the city
in the belly

see it now as the sea extended

the drowned city lit in this sky

see our sky

the bone clouds casting
Mrican

13 8
tomorrows only
an arm black balletic cloud
extends itself

dark nimbic
invertebrate squall

I am handed rain
by a portuguese man-o-war
These are

new skies
once we absorb the seas'
solution as the bodies lost

the sting
fire of lightning flesh

the water
body
au

we drown together
in our living
to drink

from this
bone

I39
VII.

the flock of black cormorants flying

underwater are these the songs returning
the escaped lifting down into the cloud
of current turning
back out of the fields of coral bolls
to the abyssal skies
the undercurrent home
to this day
noticed off any shore
the pile post the cormorants alight
on Legba's mark
open their wings and point

the bodies shining in their feathers

140
VIII. Ask for "How High the Moon"
(for Nathaniel Mackey)

a half moon at midday,

if you've seen
the gelatinous medusa

you know how it looks

like it leans
its jelly umbrella and melt off-fringes
into the wave and wind
of sunlight

The organism's membranous

delicacy, a silk stinging
thing like beauty
carried above beauty carried away
the sky its

pale parasol borealis

the bride a gauzed nubian shadow
moon holding carried away
damask balloon torn in two
over itself.

Such as yourself,
say,
living down to what

means
the melt pools in the market lot reflecting

a sky
the ended days of freeze
have glaciered liquid flawless

can afford
for looking up ...
Leaving the store

141
I overheard somebody say
"Look, the full moon,"
at only the half

carried away up.

And down time after time,
how many migrations
has ice made home
to water? and winters, to this spring?

the light and shadow holding together.

Ifin
the very pool you're looking
down into to look up at the moon
out of out of
it is thrown at you a stone
from the tire
of a car plowing through it
the turning

seasons' wheel Or
there appeared
on your forehead
this stone that backwards
threw down into the water's trouble

of turning and tire that arrow

of time which film reverses
stilling the waters Then
see the hard thought at the bottom
weighting the reflection of its moon
creation loss
each distinguished from our ghosts

*
Sculpted out of the sun-polished snow
the small david of a puddle

out of how stones can sling up at you

if you're looking {arrowheads the moon

ignescent associations between things:

the cold star struck from the broad day. Light.

When Ailey set it

to music Billie got knocked down to

what a little moonlight can do

the white stuff of cost

danced to music ask

for How High the Moon and you want

Ella to sing it bring it down

like that time she admits carried away in time

she can't remember the words to this

but what she does in time

IS
greater song the rest us

jus mostly cries out

no forward no back

*
hit in the head by the moon
no one can take the stone of that light

out of your human skull

no one can tell

143
where the bone and the sight
actually separate
now
the lost sight of all gap
opening on that

nothing they put in their bones

*
the light at midway up
out of the darkness
orpheus

all you persephones you lazari

christians and other
resurrectionists

is that circle of listening

decided
to tear you apart

I mean this song

this stone wants
to dance with you

144
IX. After the De-Tonations on the Moon by NASA
(for Bob Supamic)

We choose that others mean

something ourselves amass around
in known receptors' shape
But not what's said
We don't know.

Dancers have feet

but the amputee can sway secret
for secret the occasion
of sound to place
a place that isn't there.

A step.
That the air would accept us
that the air would accept
our song with its accents
of the ground and bring up the moon

in reply introduces us
into the touch that's kept
But not what's said
"The moon rang like a bell."
We heard and neither we nor the air were there

to speak that in its light of tongue

but we put ours against the ice
absence
like the dapper kissed it
and we stuck to words.

145
:x. Ha
I'm the night
-watchman today they call security

guards. All the same. They didn't find me screaming,

nobody picked me off

my knees, nobody had to peel my fingers free

of anything about this night

in the morning.

I leave the same entry, though,

that people have always said these things about.

like all good watch,

whether you punch out and walk off

or have to be rocked in a listener's arms-

floorboard by floorboard across this chamber-out,

like all good watch,

the entry is unchanged.

in mind between three main

pipes against a reticulated gray

sky the concrete block wall

the leaf flutter of an inspection tag

you have three straight poplars

deep in the far end of the warehouse aisle.

you would expect the night

man to have lived there alone all his shift.
But this is the night turn you pull when you can't hold
anything else.

Things happen.

water is as by straws
sucked up a tree by evaporation

off leaves the vacuum of

reach for the sun of change in state into

something lighter than blue.

We're as water and up through atmospheres

and off the earth we water

it seen free-fall spherical tree that taught us.

you would expect our burning

minds to trip gardens and falls like sprinklers.

This is the bush.

so its speech was cast print:

Grinnell Sprinkler Systems the local grove

those who go live anchorite in the woods of minimum

wage hear their careers'

ghosts approach out of;

the sudden appearance of trees that plain

answers put on like night-watch issue clothes.

As for this tongue of solitary, this's the bush it speaks

147
Deep in the far end of the warehouse aisle
as down some arm in the cluster called the local group

the Bell Labs listen to a bowl against the wall

of time to next to no time going off

from the beginning

at the molecular level

time goes forwards and backwards at ease
or rather
the difference doesn't exist or matter

at this level. at ours

we see the justice of the stars,
the balance in the arrivals of the seasons,
as if on time

-and they aren't- were something to see of itself.

and we see ourselves as such,
an order, simply because we have forward
facing us

in which we see these things.

 XI. In Light of Dream

the American is a peculiar light

since then the dark
extending from its balconies
really is

the country's shadow diving

out of the way
writhing to get King out of the line of fire
of that sun's sight

across the face

of buildings coast to coast

a dial trying
to set back that weight

... something ...

or die away into the night lying.

149
THE IOWA POETRY PRIZE WINNERS

19 87
Elton Glaser, Tropical Depressions
Michael Pettit, Cardinal Points

19 88
Bill Knott, Outremer
Mary Rudie, The Adamant

1989
Conrad Hilberry, Sorting the Smoke
Terese Svoboda, Laughing Africa

1993
Tom Andrews, The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle
Michael Heffernan, Love's Answer
John Wood, In Primary Light

1994
James McKean, Tree ofHeaven
Bin Ramke, Massacre ofthe Innocents
Ed Roberson, Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In

THE EDWIN FORD PIPER POETRY AWARD WINNERS

199 0
Philip Dacey, Night Shift at the Crucifix Factory
Lynda Hull, Star Ledger

1991
Greg Pape, Sunflower Facing the Sun
Walter Pavlich, Running near the End ofthe World

199 2
Lola Haskins, Hunger
Katherine Soniat, A Shared Life
 There is no one else like Ed Roberson---certainly
there is no other poet like him. His is an oblique,
eccentric, totally fascinating talent. Because of these
qualities, it may seem that he is difficult to follow-
as Ornette Coleman or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or
Romare Bearden seems difficult to track at times.
But his strength of vision is always evident; the
quickness and inclusiveness of his voice can sweep a
reader along into new and refreshing areas.

Voices Cast Out Roberson's poetic moves are not tricks or affected

to Talk Us In traits. They are artistic and deeply considered tech-

niques. Reading the two basic cycles of this elliptical
Poems by Ed Roberson
and intriguing work could be likened to reading
Foreword by Andrew Welsh
Ezra Pound or a more deliberate and lyrically
1994 IOWA POETRY PRIZE touched Charles Olson, but with an unanchored
allusiveness of things largely American taking the
"Ed Roberson's poems embrace the complexities
place of the Chinese and the Mayan. Roberson
of a life that reflects itself in the luminous mirrors
creates that rare combination of sophistication and
of history, painting, and music. A blur of imperfect
Simplicity which defines truly Significant poetry. In
moments informed by a vision which links the
this new work he makes the variety of our culture
various threads leading outward to our common
dance from his very special viewpoint.
world 'in which all that lifts must land.' The ebb
and flow of words, phrases, and caesuras in his
Ed Roberson is associate director of special
work convey an oceanic roll, a largesse of pos-
programs at Cook College, Rutgers University.
sibilities, how to write and how to live."
His other books are When Thy King Is a Boy, Etai-
-Lewis Warsh
Eken, and Lucid Interval as Integral Music.

"Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In stands extremely tall.

It is a wrought, wry, entrancing, transportive, University of Iowa Press
strict, soul-sustaining book."-Nathaniel Mackey Iowa City, Iowa 52242

Cover: Ballston Beach by Helen Strong. Courtesy of the Berta

"Roberson is one of those 'hidden masters'- Walker Gallery. Provincetown.
poets who have worked qUietly in private without
ISBN 0-87745-510-4
fanfare, only to emerge as vastly more accom-
plished than those of whom we have heard much. 90000
Roberson's work is poetry of an exceedingly high
order; he is one of our best." -Ed Foster 9 7
II 1111111111111111

POETRY